The Sorry State of The Web: 3 Group Special

It’s been around 15 years since I first came across Web Pages That Suck. Coming from a time when flashy Geocities-style websites were the order of the day, it was a web nitpicker’s paradise. This is where the term Mystery Meat Navigation (which I have written about in the past) was actually invented.

The very premise behind Web Pages That Suck, “learn good web design by looking at bad web design”, is something that has fascinated me back then, and still does to this day (in fact, it is one of the main reasons behind the Sorry State of the Web series).

Today, we will look at a family of related websites (belonging to a single group of companies) which I’m sure would qualify as first class citizens of Web Pages That Suck.

Enter MyKrypto

I first heard about MyKrypto on the radio. The ad described Bitcoin as a currency just like any other – and said that you could produce it! An old version of their website, which I obtained via the Google Web Cache, is along the same lines of the radio ad:

“Malta has the Euro, UK has the Pound and USA has the Dollar, the Internet has the Bitcoin. Bitcoin is digital and produced by computers..start producing money today!!”

While it’s true you can produce Bitcoins, this feels a lot like a scam in that it’s urging people to print their own money (in a way) without telling them about the risk or the difficulty involved in actually mining Bitcoins. In fact, the website also used to say that Bitcoin mining is a secure investment:

Whether Bitcoin mining is really a secure investment is debatable (although one can get an idea by looking at market crashes that have occurred in the past). In any case, while I’m not a lawyer, I don’t believe a company can legally give investment advice unless it is an authorised financial institution, especially without evaluating the risk portfolio of potential investors.

MyKrypto Home Page

The above selling points were removed, and the site transitioned into a different realm of madness. The site’s homepage had this image with Comic Sans text:

This was eventually replaced by the text image we see today:

Although the text changed, the link behind it remained the same. It’s basically a Google link (notice the URL) that takes you to this Satasoshi graphic on Deviantart:

So, in case it’s not clear, let’s summarise the fails that occur just within that little text image:

Using an image to show text with a particular font.

Using Comic Sans on what is supposed to be a serious website.

Linking to a Google search result rather than to an actual webpage.

Completely failing to understand what you’re selling (it’s a Satoshi, not Satasoshi, and the horse has nothing to do with it).

MyKrypto Mining Page

Let’s move over to MyKrypto’s Mining page. It now looks something like this:

While the image is totally out of place – and we’ll get to it – this is on the whole not too bad. Let’s take a look at what the previous version of this page (from just a couple of weeks ago) used to look like:

“Do you look up for information on the internet? Did you ever google for a product or information? Did you ever wondered how google is so intelligent by search for the right information? Google is based on mathematical calculations. FIND X. Let’s say I want to google for ‘this week top 20 music list’ as you type in the google box and press search google, google will do all the calculations to find ‘this week top 20 music list ‘. this is called Math (Algebra) when we were at school we used to have the same problem solving; – FIND X.”

It is simply beyond belief how much crap these guys have managed to fit into a single paragraph. But beyond that, take a look at the image below that paragraph in the screenshot. It’s a popular joke that has been circulating for many years: a clueless student answered a mathematical problem in a witty manner. Of course, whoever built the MyKrypto website didn’t get the joke, and put the image there as an example of mathematics. Go figure.

List of fails in this section:

Terrible use of English (if it can be called that).

Google does not solve algebraic problems to give you your search results.

Don’t lie about what you used to do at school, if you evidently know nothing about English, mathematics, or computing.

Try to understand what an image actually means, before ripping it off.

Try to understand what you’re talking about in the first place.

MyKrypto Audio

MyKrypto automatically plays audio.

That’s something really annoying, especially if you happen to already be playing music. It’s also of questionable legality depending on whether the site has the right to distribute that music.

Besides, using some cheesy 70s disco background music – reminiscent of Earth, Wind & Fire – is totally not appropriate on a company website.

MyKrypto Mobile

Mobile users will be disappointed to find out that they can’t really browse the entirety of the site because the navigation is simply not available:

MyKrypto Plagiarism

To be fair, messed up paragraphs like the one we saw earlier are a rare sight on this site. In fact, a lot of MyKrypto’s content is blatantly stolen from other websites.

Let’s see some examples:

I think they should plagiarise more. It would make them look a lot less silly.

CEO Plagiarism

Of course, the plagiarism on MyKrypto makes perfect sense if we look at the LinkedIn profile of 3 Group CEO Dario Azzopardi (MyKrypto is part of 3 Group):

When I first read this, I thought it was really weird as a job description. So I Googled part of it.

3 Group: Questionable Stuff

Having seen all this, I thought it was just as well to check what else 3 Group actually do.

3 Group do IT Services, IPTV, and E-Money. That’s a nice name for the Bitcoin stuff we’ve seen above. They actually got the link wrong, and E-Money points to IPTV.

If we take a look at IT Services, we get to this horrendous page with a background animation driving you nuts while you try to read text with very bad contrast:

Further down that page, 3 Group are trying to convince people that free antiviruses are bad, and that they should instead pay 3 Group to install McAfee for them:

Towards the bottom, you can see some grey text representing a link to Intel’s homepage. Of course, they didn’t bother to actually make it a link that you can just click on. What’s even worse is that the superhero on the left is an image overlaid onto the text where the link is, so you can’t even select and copy it.

Right, what else do 3 Group do? Ah yes, IPTV. It’s interesting how they have this “Legal” page under the IPTV section, claiming that “IPTV is 100% legal”, and quoting some court case from the European Court of Justice.

This is noteworthy because:

Naturally, a company encourages trust by stressing that its services are 100% legal.

This company knows a lot about copyright, given the aforementioned plagiarism.

It claims that “watching streams even those which are illegal is not an act of copyright infringement”. So it’s ok if it’s illegal, as long as it’s not copyright infringement, right?

Conclusion

While 3 Group’s web design is appalling at best, this is not nearly as worrying as their questionable business practices. As an exception in this series, I hope not only that web designers/developers learn from the mistakes we have seen here, but also that potential customers do some proper research and understand what these guys are actually trying to sell to them.